Southampton 

My dear Friends:

I trust you have had a good week! No doubt, as we reflected on last Sunday’s gospel, we shall have had multiple opportunities to create God’s embrace/net in our healing words and compassionate actions. This Sunday’s gospel gives a special facet to God’s love which unfolds within each one of our ‘life’s calling’.

This has been quite week! A lot of it mirrors the themes in today’s readings. I was arranging the Tuesday morning mass for three Daughters of Wisdom, Romsey, who will be celebrating sixty and seventy years in which their hearts have been wedded to the Lord in lives of consecration to him, their communities and ministry. I have sat by two deathbeds in which husbands and wives have spent sixty, and seventy-five years wedded to the Lord, in lives of consecration to him, their families and ministries within their Faith Communities. I have sat with single people, whose lives have been wedded to the Lord in the single state, lived out in love and consecration to their callings, and also unfolded in ministries to their families and Faith Communities. This is the variety of gifts St. Paul writes about!

So, my dear friends, the bottom line here is: married, single, Religious, priest, whatever (!), if we allow God’s love, his compassion, his forgiveness, his hope, his joy, his peace and his justice to unfold within our words, actions and lives, we shall become God’s glory! One ‘state’ is not better than the other. Each one of us is a facet of God’s love made present within his creation and world.

Remember me as loving you, 

Fr. Antony